Welcome to the Pi In The Sky Project
Pi In the Sky is a simple and reliable GPS radio tracker board for the Pi.
This board is a GPS receiver and radio transmitter designed for tracking high altitude balloon flights. It uses a UHF radio transmitter which is license-free in Europe (for other areas check your local regulations). To track the location of flight you also need a radio receiver, aerial and PC on the ground. Suitable radios include TV dongles - see http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:sdr_tracker for examples of suitable models and full instructions.
PITS+ Board for model A+, B+, V2 B
We now have a new board which is smaller and lighter, and includes 2 radio transmitters (RTTY and LoRa). This is sold complete with a Pi Zero and pre-programmed SD card.
PITS Zero with Pi Zero
Together with the supplied, open-source software these boards embody the experience of 70 successful flights, over half of which have used the Raspberry Pi. These boards have also been used on all the Raspberry Pi Skycademy flights, and many more customer flights.
It features:
- Efficient built-in power regulator providing run time of over 20 hours from 4 AA cells
- Highly sensitive UBlox GPS receiver approved for altitudes up to 50km
- Temperature compensated, frequency agile, Radiometrix 434MHz radio transmitter
- Temperature sensor
- Battery voltage monitoring
- Sockets for external i2c devices, analog input, external temperature sensor
- Allows use of Raspbery Pi camera
- Mounting holes and spacers for a solid connection to the Pi
The open-source software provides these features:
- Radio telemetry with GPS and sensor data using UKHAS standard
- Radio image download using SSDV standard
- Multi-threaded to maximize use of the radio bandwidth
- Variable image size according to altitude
- Stores full-definition images as well as smaller transmitted images
- Automatically chooses better images for download
- Configurable via text file in the Windows-visible partition of the SD card
- Supplied as github repository with instructions, or SD card image
You can purchase the boards via Uputronics here:
For support, see our support pages or read the new manual.
We do now support the Pi B V3 (see updated instructions / manual). We still recommend an A+ for flight however (lower power consumption and less weight).
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